CHAPTER THREE
CANADA’S CAPTAIN AHAB
“Dr. Newman combines the best qualities of Louis Pasteur and P.T. Barnum. He is a unique public servant in that he has the complete respect and recognition of his professional colleagues all over North America and at the same time has managed to appeal to the public fancy.”
JACK WASSERMAN, VANCOUVER SUN, 1963
THE VANCOUVER AQUARIUM was expanding, and Murray Newman wanted a star attraction. Marineland’s director had warned Newman about their catastrophic expedition, so he knew that killer whales were too dangerous to capture. But Newman’s dream was to feature local marine life in his aquarium, and he considered the killer whale not just the most impressive aquatic specimen in his part of the world but “the most magnificent of all living creatures.”
On a tour of Europe in 1960, Newman had visited the British Natural History Museum and was enchanted by its life-sized models— elephants, a great white shark, and, best of all, a hall of whales, which included both the skeleton and a replica of a blue whale. Newman wanted his own whale, but unlike the statues in London, he wanted his model to be a perfect, anatomically accurate replica of the most feared predator on the planet. This would be scientifically significant—and it would scare the hell out of little kids. What more could any curator want from an exhibit?
Born in Chicago in 1924, Newman was a self-described “Depression boy.” His father had a prestigious publishing job and loved to hunt and fish as a hobby. Then the stock market crashed, and fishing and hunting became a way to feed the family.
“Dad loved trout for breakfast,” recalled Newman. “Dad also traded trout with a farmer in exchange for fruit and vegetables.” Ever the academic, Newman noted that his father’s favorite trout weren’t really trout. “They called them eastern brook trout, but they were really char.” While Dad angled for breakfast, young Murray lay on the ground watching the fish, studying them, and realized they were fighting. He founded his first aquarium while he was still in elementary school, when he bought a fishbowl from the dime store and regularly spent his allowance on the specimens they kept in the back room. He eventually saved enough money to buy his own tank and learned to care for the few fancy fish he could afford.
After a year at the University of Chicago as a science undergrad, Newman was drafted and joined the navy. One of his first postings was at the Battle of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. His fondest memory? The tropical fish.
When his stint was over, he completed his degree, then earned a master’s in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis focused on the behavior of trout—real trout, not the kind his dad had caught. Newman studied the same thing that had fascinated him when he watched his father fish—the way the tiny creatures fought for dominance. He was lured to Canada by fish stories about all of the unique types of trout in British Columbia waters.
Murray and his wife, Kathy, moved to Vancouver, where Newman was awarded the first ever H.R. MacMillan Fellowship in fisheries to help fund his PhD studies at the University of British Columbia. Newman’s life changed again when he met his scholarship’s patron— H.R. MacMillan. The Canadian lumber baron liked company on his 137-foot converted minesweeper, the Marijean. Sometimes he’d take friends—the most powerful men in the province—and catch fish for sport. Sometimes he’d take scientists and catch specimens. Sometimes he’d take both. Newman became MacMillan’s go-to naturalist for the next dozen years. MacMillan became Newman’s friend and patron, and Newman soon found himself on a first-name basis with the province’s powerbrokers.
In 1955, Newman was appointed head of the Vancouver Public Aquarium. It was more of a concept than an institution, but it came with $300,000 in funding commitments from various levels of governments. Newman became the first employee of Canada’s first ever public aquarium, and it was his job to create . . . something.
Although Newman’s UBC mentors were keen on their student’s candidacy, some board members wanted a flashier figure to spearhead the city’s new tourist attraction. Already balding at thirty-one, with a slow Midwestern drawl, Newman looked and sounded like a lab nerd—an ichthyologist, not an impresario. But despite his scientific demeanor, Newman was an explorer at heart—always happy to jump into new adventures, preferably when he was in his diving gear, ideally with his wife, Kathy, beside him.
THE AQUARIUM OPENED on June 15, 1956. Admission for adults was twenty-five cents. In the first two days more than 10,000 visitors showed up. By the end of the first year, 342,870 people had passed through the turnstiles. Since the population of Vancouver was only 344,833, Newman celebrated the aquarium’s first anniversary with a press release joking that “if you are one of those 1,963 unlucky Vancouverites who did not get around to see the fish in 1957, perhaps you will be able to make it in 1958.” He also raised adult admission by a dime.
In 1963, Vancouver city council held a plebiscite to determine whether residents were prepared to pay $250,000 to expand the aquarium. The provincial and federal governments committed to matching the city’s contribution. Newspaper columnist Jack Wasserman, the voice of Vancouver, warned that if the aquarium didn’t expand, it wouldn’t be big enough to contain Newman’s ambitions, and the province couldn’t afford to let their curator go. “If we lose Murray Newman it will be a tragedy of the first magnitude. Even greater than if we lost the Premier.” Newman got his funding. It was time to play Ahab.
“I felt that a lot of the aquatic wildlife was savagely treated and the public should really know more about all of these different kinds of animals. So in planning an expansion I thought, wouldn’t it be marvelous if we could sort of symbolize the waters of British Columbia by having a perfect model of a killer whale.” Newman wanted a proper sculptor to craft this model. And to make sure the model wasn’t just attractive but also accurate, he was determined to kill a whale and then measure it in the water, while it maintained its size and shape. This level of concern for precision was positively cutting edge for the era.
The media was fascinated by the idea of an expedition to track “the marine world’s public enemy number one.” And in 1964, there was nothing controversial about hunting a killer whale, or pretty much anything else.
A few years earlier, Newman had made headlines when the aquarium caught and killed one of B.C.’s last basking sharks as the model for a similar sculpture. The second-largest fish in the world after the whale shark (real whales are mammals), basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) grow to forty feet in length, weigh up to ten thousand pounds, have huge mouths with tiny teeth, and pretty much all they do is bask. According to fossil records, they’ve been preying on plankton for about 30 million years. Most sharks are in perpetual motion, but basking sharks live like middle-aged tourists at an all-inclusive resort—they float in the water, waiting for food to show up. Their dream diet is krill (small crustaceans). The shark’s huge open mouth may look like a death trap, but the only way it would hurt a fly is if the fly flew in with dinner.
They are, however, extremely lethal to gill nets (and vice versa), and there were enough sharks basking in the mid-twentieth century that they used to be seen traveling in groups of up to a hundred off the Pacific coast. In other parts of the world, basking sharks were hunted—and rendered—like whales. The fish have oversized livers— up to a quarter of their considerable body weight—which means they’re rich in oil. Their skin can be used as leather, their cartilage is sold as medicine, and their remains made fine fish meal. But in 1948, B.C. fishermen lobbied the provincial government to place a bounty on the sharks. A year later, basking sharks were declared “destructive pests” and received the same government-sanctioned death warrant as black bears, seals, and sea lions. It was the job of Canada’s fisheries officers to kill these creatures on sight.
